SPEAKER_06 0:06

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. The Roman philosopher Boethius had actually three definitions for music. Music instrumentalis, which is the music of voices and instruments that we only consider music now, but also musica mundana, the music of the spheres, of earth and space that we explored in this very series. But a third category, musica humana, the music of the body itself. And he felt that music was so naturally entwined with us that we couldn't escape it even if we so desired. And of course, we can hear before we can see. So our first experience of the world is bathed in sound, the cross-rhythm of our hearts with our mothers and the various systems enveloping us, but also the external world. Studies have shown that babies in the room can even remember melodies that they hear for months afterwards. And when we're born as humans, we develop this awesome system of being able to communicate. Now this comes at the cost of risking choking, but it's uh a worthy sacrifice because it allows speech and communication, this um incredible facility we have to make sounds. I'll let my friend here uh explain.

SPEAKER_04 1:44

Speech production is possibly the most complex of human behaviors. In one second of fluent speech, we can produce approximately five or six syllables comprising ten to twelve phonemes and a variety of articulatory gestures.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Really?

SPEAKER_04 1:58

This requires coordinating dozens of muscles from the diaphragm and rib cage used to provide the source of sound as air passes through the larynx to the tongue, lips, and jaw, used with precision to shape the chambers of the vocal tract.

SPEAKER_06 2:14

But music itself has adopted this system and has its own phonemes. Here's an MRI of someone singing some opera.

SPEAKER_09 2:22

Allah Vincer Vincer.

SPEAKER_06 2:31

And now in a rock style. And you can see that even though it's the same note and the same vowel sound, there are distinct ways of shaping the voice in order to express. Here are some. And altogether. But we have not fully tapped what the vocal tracts can do. This wonderful artist has developed this technique of not only classical singing but overtone singing as well. Let's listen to a little bit. And there's been this evolution of using our bodies and mouths to make music, to emulate instruments, to use body production. Here's some Bobby McFerrin for you.

SPEAKER_10 5:16

Eh. I thought it would be easy. That's good, but it's not over here.

SPEAKER_06 5:50

Oh our friend Bellatrix, who's not only emulates instruments but drum machines and turntable scratching itself. So it's become this elevated art form at this point.

unknown 6:32

Power.

SPEAKER_06 6:34

And unless you've kept up with this, you really have no idea how far this has developed, the skill and craft. And it seems we're always discovering what the human voice can do. This is one voice. But we understand a voice when it loses control, like when it's very sad. We understand that emotion because of these features. Short gasps, narrow intervalic movement, usually downwards, high frequency no noise bursts, and tremors. And this ports over into music. Similar things, little breaths, outbursts, and narrow intervalic motion. As if it's bursting with this painful emotion. This profoundly sad Elgar Peace who ran the gamut of these emotions. And you can see that he obliges gaps because of the use of double-stop chords, but he also writes in breaths, those little comma marks, just this desperate gasp and for this outburst of emotion. But we also lose control for happier reasons, and that's laughter. And laughter is a really incredible way of connecting with someone, showing that you trust. And we're so attuned to that, we to it that we can tell the difference between laughter, which is voluntary and performative, and one that is involuntary and spontaneous. So you tell me which of these is spontaneous and which one is voluntary. You can feel that the second has more freedom to it. And it's because of these gasps, the lack of oxygen, and also these louder, higher bursts that come out of that moment. It's infectious. Because when we're laughing like that, we are helpless. We risk being choked. We can literally can't breathe. And although it's fun, it's almost painful.

SPEAKER_10 10:37

And even I'm here like, oh, are you okay?

SPEAKER_06 10:48

And that loss of control is um very powerful. Here's an infamous um news broadcast from Radio 4, where Charlotte Green is about to read the news excerpt, and the preceding excerpt mentions this name, which isn't funny at all, Jack Twat. Unfortunately, someone whispers into her ear, Jack Twat, before she has to speak. She holds it together professionally for a while, but I've put in square moments when the vocal folds waver, it becomes higher and out of control until she hits this top squeak around an A-flat. Popular chief of staff, Jack Twatt, taking over.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

A forty-foot sperm whale, which was stranded in the further forth for more than four days, is now thought to be swimming towards open waters again. It freed itself late last night. Marine experts are hoping to establish this morning whether the whale is finally back at sea. Good luck to the whale. Ten past eight is the time. An investigation is from the whale.

SPEAKER_06 11:50

So this moment again, you can see those crazy motions of pitch. This morning, whether the whale is finally back at sea. And musicians embed these sort of gestures in their music. Elgar, again, running the gamut of emotions, wrote the Enigma variations, and each of them is a message to one of his dear friends, sharing a private joke. And the one to Dorabella, variation 10, puts her stuttering laugh in there using similar mechanisms.

SPEAKER_03 12:43

Sometimes very shake your hand.

SPEAKER_05 12:54

Laughing in rhythm.

SPEAKER_06 13:07

Of course there is no music without the ear, but its mechanisms itself really sculpt how we make music and why this sort of interval sounds different from this one. The reason is the sound comes into something called the cochlea, which is like a seashell shape, and on its surface is a basile membrane, which is tonotopic. It reacts to different pitches, different frequencies along this surface, like a keyboard. So when you hear music, you're tickling this membrane like this. However, it feels dissonant when two frequencies are close together. When they're exactly the same, it's consonant, but when they're very close, it creates this sensory dissonance. As we separate those two notes, you'll see there's this peak of dissonance that appears there. And as we separate those two pictures, we return to consonants again. Now that's a simple shape when it comes to two sine waves, two pure frequencies, but sound coming out of an instrument has a series of overtones, usually at regular multiplications of the frequency. So when we're actually playing two instrumental sounds together, we have a much more complex pattern of dissonance as the various lines come into coordinates and rub against each other. And you'll feel valleys and peaks of pain. Or six to five, the minor third. So when we use equal temperaments, like on this piano here, we are hitting some of these quite close, but you can see not exactly. It's convenient to have 12 notes, but it doesn't exploit all these minima. In fact, you can see the major third here misses. It's a little too sharp. So if we use actually that minima, it sounds like that and settles into place. But it gets more complex because we don't just hear two notes at once. What about three? That means we're combining two profiles together. So instead of a two-dimensional surface, get ready for this, it turns into this three-dimensional dissonance plane. So all triads exist on this surface here, with peaks that are very dissonant, and the valleys with our familiar triads. So I'll pick a valley over here, just on that top right, and we'll find sus chords, major chords, minor chords, and another sus two chord there. And we can explore anywhere on this, just with three chords, like this mount dissonance, yikes, and these other. And we're hearing these all the time. And more complex still is that every instrument has its own pattern of minima and maxima of dissonance. Strings and pipes have different moments. In fact, a metal bar has minima, about that divides the octave roughly in five parts. Which is why perhaps the Indonesian gamelan uses this scale called Slendro. Just as the our vocal tract is evolving, our ear is very adaptable to these. We've totally accepted 12-tone equal temperament. But with some enculturation, we can easily manage 24-tone equal temperament. As used in Arabic machan for this might sound alien to you, but bear with me. If you want to get into this, you either need no frets or lots of frets to bide up the fretboard. You also need new symbols here in between the semitones. You need quarter tones. Now, as proof that we can that 12-tone equal temperament is just an option and not a prescription of the ear, I'm going to play you some music by the French-Canadian micro-tonal duo called Enjon de Poitrine, who have become immensely popular playing 24-tone equal temperament music using a looper and drums. And um, if after about six repetitions you don't like it, I I can't help you any further, but you might find you do. So this is one and a half minutes of twenty-four-tone equal temperament looping uh rock, shall we call it? Let's go. So music moves at the speed of life, and I find it's extraordinary that the musical time frames actually marry with bodily functions. So we tend to, our heart rates and our and we and our walking speed tends to be at the range of a metronome. Our fingers move at the subdivision layer and we react at the microtiming layer. Our breaths happen in the length of a musical phrase, even with uh instruments that don't need uh breath. And so, in a way, we um the body dictates how we experience music. Here's a heartbeat from the uh academic and musician Elaine Chow, who has heart arrhythmia, and she transcribed her heartbeat to create um this pattern here. And this maps beautifully to the heartbeat of the Tanger. We can understand it because of our bodies. In fact, Promenade, aptly named by Mizotsky, happens at the speed of a moderate walk, so I've given some um vintage footage from the time it was written, so we can feel what he saw in the world around him. And the fastest we can feel a beat is about as fast as our legs can move. So as an experiment, I've got Usain Bolt's 100-meter world record and put a tempeny for every time he takes a stride. But because it moves at that beat, it's about as fast as we can experience a musical rhythm. So I'm gonna put some music to this, the sabre dance, why not?

SPEAKER_05 22:40

Hush descends on this mighty packed arena. Bolt gay Powell four, five, six.

SPEAKER_06 23:01

I mapped this really exactly, and then afterwards he started dancing, so I did the same. We make our instruments for our bodies so they sort of reflect us. They are made in our own image. But also the music art we make is not driven by our mind alone, but also where our hands happen to fall. For example, it's very comfortable to put your two fingers like this, uh, first finger and third finger with an open string, and you can just move it around and find positions here that fall under your hand. And this is what Paul McCartney did. He took a fragment of bark which had that little finger motion, moved it around, and then blackbirds fell into his hands. Simple idiomatic moves. Secondary dominance, sorry. A music form which is particularly embodied is that of flamenco. Highly sophisticated, highly trained, but it feels like it's driven by the body itself. Flamenco guitar, the extraordinary skill, is as much an exercise in precise relaxation as it is in terms of developed technique. The rascado technique, as will be demonstrated here by a flamenco player we met in Andalusia, he describes it as like a fan, abanico, because of the looseness that it requires. Also, the chords that are played are beautiful but idiomatic, and the harmonies emerge from the hands itself themselves.

SPEAKER_02 25:11

Go.

SPEAKER_06 25:44

And the foot stumps, the heel clicks, the hand claps, and these incredible guitar playing and the expressive deep vocals all conspire to create this deeply embodied music. But not just that, sometimes the hand shape itself informs the musical structures. The dance cigarillas, this rhythmic cycle, is sometimes taught by looking at your right hand or your left hand towards you and noting the length of the fingers. Short, short, long, long, short, short, short, long, long, short. And once you have these keys to Flamenko, those complex rhythms start to make sense into this embodied heartbeat. Let's listen to a little bit. And you see the complex rhythms, but still obeying that structure. Long, long, short, short, short, long, long. The Gridonian hand attributed to Guido d'Arezzo, the Italian composer and music instructor and theorist, is the key to understanding scales themselves. Here's him saying hi. And here's how it worked. Scales without notation, which was costly and time-consuming, can be thought of as existing on the hand and various knuckle joints. Starting on the thumb. And because it started on a G, gamma, and it started with uh the first sulfate syllable, which was oot then, that was gamma oot, which gives us the word gamut, as in the span. And this would go round in this spiral shape. So you would be able to memorize melodies and indicate them on your hand itself. You could even start that hexachord at different positions to get different scales. Let's listen to a couple. So here's a hexachord. And then starting again. And you can fit one more in, ending on the tip of the finger. And play melodies with this. You could start in another position, use the same pattern of intervals to get a different scale. It's like Julie Andrews. That's my joke for the day. And starting on the F. And these could be combined to create beautiful harmonies. And so a musician could literally carry around hundreds of tunes in the palm of their hand. Here's some palestrina mapped out to the Guidonian hand. Sorry to interrupt that. But we should ask whose body music comes out of. Django Reinhardt Reinhardt the hugely influential jazz guitarist and musician had a tragic accident when he was just 18 and his caravan had a fire. It left him in hospital for a month with burns from knees to his chest and huge scar tissues on his left hand, his fretting hand. He was playing banjo already. And it means he could only really agilely move two his index and middle finger, and these two were kind of locked together. And rather than giving up, he held up those two fingers to fate and found a way of playing, which not only managed to express himself, but changed the course of that music forever, applying approach tones and arpeggios as over scales, and playing with such incredible, not just precision but expressive power. We have only one piece of footage of him playing, but it shows this clearly. Instead of giving up, he commissions a piece for a concerto for left hand only from Ravel himself. And the two of them together came up with such invention compositionally and technically that it embarrasses people with two hands, frankly. This one. And what it takes to play that note. You see, the violin string is actually quite short, like a ruler, essentially. And each note is a proportion of the remaining part, so they get progressively closer together. So it starts at two centimetres apart, but by the time we get to G7, they're about two millimeters apart. So in order to play this note to 10% accuracy, you have to literally play at a paperwidth accuracy. With all these wonderful things that music does to the body, it's no wonder that it's been used therapeutically. Can it alleviate stress, insomnia, it can improve memory, attention, our neuroplasticity, and it can even help people recover movement because of the audio motor coupling it invites. And because of its group bonding, it releases oxytocin and our own opioids, which can be useful in pain relief. So it's important in social bonding, but also on our own personal identities. It's almost like this wonder drug for our inner bodies. So it becomes all the more strange that there is such a mental health problem among musicians who use music on a daily basis. Now you could say this is partly because of the hyper competition or the job insecurity, but even taking those factors to hand, it seems that musicians are disproportionately subject to these issues of depression and anxiety. How do we explain this? Well, I have a hypothesis, which is that music isn't causing this, it's that musicians may be more prone to these feelings, more these sensitivities. So they turn to music as a form of therapy. In short, musicians need music. And the body itself can be a source of music. It's an extraordinary early 15th century piece modeled on the heart, which is both the theme and the structure of the work. So the melody starts on the curve of this heart, not anatomically correct heart, admittedly. At any one point in time, like now, there is a person being born in the world. It's happening about three times a second, I think. And we could assign that to a high note on the piano every time someone's born. And perhaps a lower note when someone dies. And so we could tell the population growth by that cross rhythm, about three against two. People being born in the high melody and passing away in the lower portion. Music can also be the source for people who have lost the ability to move, like the award-winning artist Daniel Solomons, who about 25 years ago had a stroke and he could no longer sculpt like he used to. And he spent and he still continues to spend daily work modelling clay and creates wonderful artwork to do so. And this year he commissioned me to turn his brain waves as he's thinking about moving his hand and the muscular movement as he moves his hands into a piece of music. I think it sounds quite sinister, but he loves it, so who am I to judge? Here's the mapping of cases of Ebolo in three African countries, and uh depending on the amount of cases, it triggers a musical uh object, a musical figure. And naturally emerging from this disease growth is this orchestral swelling. It mutated so quickly that you can assign notes to points in the genomic sequence that mutated. And because it had certain breaky areas, um motifs would return. So we managed to turn the entire history of its mutation across the outbreak into a 42-minute choral piece where these figures come back. Perhaps the father of this thinking is the poet-philosopher Rilke, who in this extraordinary essay of 1919 called Primal Sound, he noted that the pattern of the coronal suture, the seam that connects your skull parts together, had a strange um similarity to that of the groove of a phonographic record. And he posed the question what happens if we tricked a needle to play back that suture, what sounds would come into being, what feelings, incredulity or fear, and which of these prevents me from naming this primal sound? And in fact, he was spot on because a microscopic image of a photograph of a phonograph looks very much like a suture. Now, um Rilke died of leukemia and wouldn't live long enough to turn this thought experiment into reality. Um born in the wrong time, unfortunately. But in 2004, I managed to do so, and from a Victorian contemporaneous woman's skull, we gathered this shape and played a virtual needle over it. Amplitude over time creates a record scratch. Frequency over time is a siren melody. But inverting it reveals this beautiful harmony as it hits the middle notes and spreads the low and high ones. And these can all be pressed together. And the sound that comes into being is something that was always there, that was just plucked from thin air. Just a few weeks after completing this piece, um I had an internal orchestra of my own, and after collapsing at work with bruises and breathlessness, I was rushed to hospital where they found I had developed a rare and dangerous form of leukemia, just like Rilka. And being stuck in that hotel room with my white blood cells proliferating, I apologize for these next images, but I thought I'd share them. I find myself with a laptop, steroids, and lots of data. So you know what happens next. I devise this idea of uh marking my passage of time in a piece where every day of treatment is a second of the piece, and I wouldn't choose any notes, I would just let my blood cells dictate them. So every second of this is not just autobiographical but autobiological. And when I hear this, I can hear my uh journey from deep illness to eventual recovery. Day five, six, bad days. I got better. Otherwise, it'd be a very short lecture. But my body ravaged from radiotherapy, our chance of starting a family was very limited and unlikely. We did have some hope, and I thought that it that hope deserves some marking. So this embryo got its own motifs. An ode to a life that might never come to be. Because DNA is very much like music, it's combinatorial and it passes things on, like connecting people. In fact, you get a melody from a father, one from a mother, and they would combine together. So, in a way, music, like DNA, connects us to other people, allows us to add our melody to the evolving symphony of life. Thank you so much.